How a group of children’s book illustrators from the Philippines drew emotions in their bodies.

Rev Cruz asked 23 artists in the Phillipines to draw emotions in the body

I checked my facebook messages and found this absolute hidden gem!

“Hello! I am Rev Cruz, a physiotherapist and a graphic designer/illustrator from the Philippines. I came about your video about Illustrating Emotions a day before my workshop with children’s book illustrators.

I already have my own activity for the workshop, but I thought it would be interesting if I replciated part of your research with my small group, as an introduction to my main activity. I was also curious as to how my group would respond to your questionnaire.

I only focused on the first question of your research where the respondents were asked to draw the respective emotions on the body templates. As these were illustrators, they went overboard on the 15 minute time I gave them. Here is the result where I superimposed everything.

Even with a small sample size (23 participants) and with a specialized group (all artists), the resulting picture closely resembles your results.

I found your research so interesting, and I was so curious how my fellow illustrators might interpret the concepts, hence I recreated your experiment as an activity in a workshop we did.

I’m currently handling a group of homeschooled children from ages 7-11 and 12 to 15, and I might recreate the experiment for this group.”

Thanks so much Rev for the attribution to here and for kindly sharing the results of your study as well. This visual summary is so carefully assembled and the artwork is delicate and beautiful.

I have placed my original research below for readers’ comparison. It is interesting to notice the colour results from your group combined with the drawings. The hot and cool range is similar: anger as red, love as red / yellow, joy as yellow, fear and sadness as cool/dark. (I have been looking at a way to do this without the colours going to black).